Adaptive Page Replacement to Protect Thrashing in Linux

Overview

This paper proposes and implements a thrashing protection patch in Linux kernels, which makes replacement policy responsively, resolve excessive memory paging by temporarily helping one of the active processes quickly build up its working set. Consequently, thrashing could be eliminated at the level of page replacement, so that load controls at a higher level, such as process suspensions/ swapping can be avoided or delayed until it is truly necessary. The experiments show that the patch can significantly reduce page faults and the execution time of each individual thrashing process for several groups of interacting programs. The paper also show that the method introduces little additional overhead to program executions, and its implementation in Linux (or Unix) system is straightforward.